The Story of the Gun

Now extended thru August 9

Created and Performed by Mike Daisey

Approximately two hours, without an intermission

Mike Daisey returns to tackle our nation’s most provocative subject: America’s relationship with guns. Throwing easy answers and partisan bickering out the window, he delves into the history of the gun and its place in our national culture, cutting through the political static with hilarious comedy, brilliant observation, and pitch-perfect timing.

“The master storyteller—one of the finest solo performers of his generation”New York Times

Please be aware that late seating for this show will be extremely limited.

Woolly does not offer advisories about subject matter, as sensitivities vary from person to person. If you have any questions about content, please contact our box office at 202-393-3939.

"Stark yet wryly entertaining"

Washington Post

"It's just a wooden table, a chair, a simple backdrop... and one of America's greatest storytellers doing what he does best."

Broadway World

"Thought-provoking and entertaining... very much worth experiencing"

DC Metro Theater Arts

About Mike Daisey

MIKE DAISEY (Creator and Performer), who has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by the New York Times, is the preeminent monologist in the American theater today. He has toured for two decades across five continents, ranging from remote islands in the South Pacific to the Sydney Opera House to abandoned theaters in post-Communist Tajikistan to Broadway. Over dozens of monologues he has reinvented the form, from his critically acclaimed 29-night live theatrical novel, All the Faces of the Moon, a forty-hour performance staged at the Public Theater, to The Last Cargo Cult, where he gave away his entire fee every night as part of a performance on the economic collapse, to his eternally evolving series All Stories Are Fiction which he has been creating and performing since 2004.

As a playwright, his transcript of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was downloaded over 100,000 times in its first week. Under a revolutionary open license, it has seen hundreds of productions around the world, been translated into six languages, and years later there are productions being staged every night from in Germany to Sao Paolo to mainland China. His prescient monologue The Trump Card predicted Trump’s rise to power and was staged by over thirty theater companies across America as a national piece of political theater, and performed by Daisey himself on an eighteen city whistlestop tour that culminated in him bringing the show to Broadway.

He’s been a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, the Late Show with David Letterman, as well as a commentator and contributor to the New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Vanity Fair, Slate, Salon, NPR, and the BBC. In a brief, meteoric career with This American Life, the two full episodes dedicated to his work are among the most listened to and argued about in that program’s history. He is the only storyteller in America who was written into another playwright’s play as a central character, for which he then won an Obie by proxy. He has also been nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award, two Drama League Awards, and is the recipient of the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, six Seattle Times Footlight Awards, the Sloan Foundation’s Galileo Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship.

He is currently performing A People’s History, a show that covers all of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States mixed against Mike’s own US history textbook he was taught from at sixteen. It is a twenty-eight hour show performed in eighteen chapters, covering five hundred and twenty eight years of American history. He is also at work on his second book, Here at the End of Empire, which will be published by Simon and Schuster. You can listen to his podcast All Stories Are Fiction where you can hear many more of his stories. If you read to the end of this, reward yourself with a cookie. You seriously earned it.